*snuffle*
Still plagued. Have acquired antibiotics and am now deploying them. Will wreak bloody viscous vengeance against the agent of my infection just as soon as I figure out which of these sniffling students is to blame.
I had terribly complicated dreams last night. At first I was stat-juggling on the back of a pterodactyl as I led an army of dinosaurs across Asia in some sort of real-life strategy RPG. Then, some time after the spontaneous disappearance of the eighth floor of a hotel that already had a free-wheelin' approach to geometry, I ended up at a concert given by people cosplaying as science fiction characters cosplaying as other science fiction characters, and then I was breaking into people's homes to take a shower and steal boxes of custard-filled Corn Pops. "How does the custard remain so cool and moist without refrigeration?" I asked myself just before waking.
I bet if I took some decent cough medication, I could spend an entire REM cycle playing Calvinball on the moon with Betty Rubble and that one animatronic drummer from Showbiz Pizza.
In other news, I'm falling behind on NaNoWriMo because I keep doing silly things like sleeping and spending a couple hours studying up on Russian so that one character could have a proper name. I think the time has come to back off on the filler, since it's taken me 8,000 words to get to get to Section II on an outline that goes up to X, and there is as yet only one dead body. This is Not Right and must be Corrected with Mass Slaughter of the Peasantry. At least the protagonist has clothes on now.
And because I'm rambling, I'll add here that I showed my calc students an application of implicit differentiation ("Hey, kids, you can pull that dy/dx bit with the equation of a circle, or you can split the circle into two functions and differentiate each, and either way you'll get the same thing! Neat, huh?"), and their eyes lit up a little bit. One of them actually used the word "cool." After all the griping they've been doing about the chain rule, it's good to see them really get something and be happy to have gotten it. They still scowled at me over the problem that twice required them to use the chain rule in conjunction with the product rule, but at least we had a moment.
I had terribly complicated dreams last night. At first I was stat-juggling on the back of a pterodactyl as I led an army of dinosaurs across Asia in some sort of real-life strategy RPG. Then, some time after the spontaneous disappearance of the eighth floor of a hotel that already had a free-wheelin' approach to geometry, I ended up at a concert given by people cosplaying as science fiction characters cosplaying as other science fiction characters, and then I was breaking into people's homes to take a shower and steal boxes of custard-filled Corn Pops. "How does the custard remain so cool and moist without refrigeration?" I asked myself just before waking.
I bet if I took some decent cough medication, I could spend an entire REM cycle playing Calvinball on the moon with Betty Rubble and that one animatronic drummer from Showbiz Pizza.
In other news, I'm falling behind on NaNoWriMo because I keep doing silly things like sleeping and spending a couple hours studying up on Russian so that one character could have a proper name. I think the time has come to back off on the filler, since it's taken me 8,000 words to get to get to Section II on an outline that goes up to X, and there is as yet only one dead body. This is Not Right and must be Corrected with Mass Slaughter of the Peasantry. At least the protagonist has clothes on now.
And because I'm rambling, I'll add here that I showed my calc students an application of implicit differentiation ("Hey, kids, you can pull that dy/dx bit with the equation of a circle, or you can split the circle into two functions and differentiate each, and either way you'll get the same thing! Neat, huh?"), and their eyes lit up a little bit. One of them actually used the word "cool." After all the griping they've been doing about the chain rule, it's good to see them really get something and be happy to have gotten it. They still scowled at me over the problem that twice required them to use the chain rule in conjunction with the product rule, but at least we had a moment.